ON A HIGH-NUMBER CABLE CHANNEL THAT I THINK IS called c.r.a.p That n.o.body Else Will Show TV, I once saw an ancient movie serial about these adventurers who descend to the center of the earth and discover an underground civilization. It's an evil empire, of course.

The emperor resembles Ming the Merciless from those old Flash Gordon festivals of hok.u.m, and he intends to make war on the surface world and take it over as soon as he develops the right death ray. Or when his immense fingernails grow long enough to be appropriate for the ruler of an entire planet, whichever comes first.

This underworld is populated by the usual thugs and knaves, but also by two or three kinds of mutants, women in horned hats, and of course dinosaurs. This film masterwork was made decades before the invention of computer animation, and the dinosaurs were not even stop-motion clay models but iguanas. Rubber appliances were glued to the iguanas to make them appear scarier and more like dinosaurs, but they just looked like embarra.s.sed iguanas.

Descending the vertical chase, careful step by careful step, I reran the plot of that old serial in my mind, striving to focus on the absurd mustache of the emperor, on the particular race of mutants that looked suspiciously like dwarfs outfitted with rubber-snake headgear and leather pantaloons, on remembered bits of the hero's dialogue marked by a wit that crackled like cream cheese, and on those campily amusing iguanasaurs.

My mind kept drifting to Datura, that dependable spike through the foot: to Datura, to reverse psychic magnetism, to how unpleasant it would be when she disemboweled me and fished her amulet out of my stomach. Not good.

The air in the service well proved not to be as savory as the soot-scented, toxin-laced air in the rest of the hotel. Stale, dank, alternately sulfurous and mildewy, it gathered substance as I went down into the hotel, until it seemed thick enough to drink.

From time to time, horizontal chases entered the well, and in some instances, drafts flowed from them. These cool currents smelled different from but no better than the shaft air.

Twice I began to gag. Both times I had to pause to repress the urge to heave.

The stink, the claustrophobic dimensions of this chimney, the trace chemicals and mold spores in the air combined to make me feel lightheaded by the time I had descended only four floors.

Although I knew that my imagination was running away with me, I wondered if a couple of dead bodies-human, not rat- might lie at the bottom of the shaft, undiscovered by the rescue crews and post-fire search teams, reposing in a slime of decomposition.

The deeper I went, the more determined I became not to direct the flashlight downward, for fear of what I would see at the bottom: not just the tumbled dead, but a grinning figure standing atop them.

Representations of Kali always show her naked, brazen. In that particular idol called a jagrata jagrata, she is gaunt and very tall. From her open mouth protrudes a long tongue, and she bares two fangs. She radiates a terrible beauty, perversely appealing.

Every two floors, I pa.s.sed through another crawls.p.a.ce. At each of these interruptions, I could have gotten off the ladder, then on it once more; instead, I found myself switching to the rope, using the knots as grips, swinging back to the ladder when it reappeared.

Given my lightheadedness and incipient nausea, using the rope struck me as reckless. I used it anyway.

In her temple representations, Kali holds a noose in one hand, a staff topped by a skull in another. In her third, she holds a sword; in her fourth, a severed head.

I thought I heard movement below me. I paused, but then told myself that the noise had been only the echo of my breathing, and I continued down.

Painted numbers on the wall identified each floor as I went by it, even when no pa.s.sable opening existed at that level. As I reached the second floor, my right foot dipped into something wet and cold. When I dared to direct my light below, I found that the bottom of the shaft was filled with stagnant black water and debris. I could go no farther by this route.

I climbed to the crawls.p.a.ce between the second and third floors and exited the vertical chase.

If rats had perished at this level, they died not by suffocation but by hungry mouths of fire that spat out not even charred bones. The flames had been so intense, they left behind an absolute black soot that absorbed the beam of the flashlight and gave back no reflection.

Twisted, buckled, melted, mercurial metal shapes, which had once been heating-and-cooling equipment, formed a bewildering landscape that no mere drinking binge or jalapeno pizza could have inspired in a nightmare. The soot that coated everything-here a film, there an inch deep-was not powdery, not dry, but greasy.

Weaving around and climbing over these amorphous and slippery obstacles proved treacherous. In places, the floor felt as if it had bowed, suggesting that the heat at the height of the blaze had been so terrible that rebar embedded inside the concrete had begun to melt and had almost failed.

The air here was more foul than in the shaft, bitter, almost rancid, yet seemed thin, as if I were at some great alt.i.tude. The singular texture of the soot gave me intolerable ideas about the source of it, and I tried to think instead about the iguanasaurs, but saw Datura in my mind's eye, Datura with a necklace of human skulls.

I crawled on hands and knees, slithered on my belly, squeezed through a heat-smoothed sphincter of metal in a blast-blown bulkhead of rubble, and thought of Orpheus in h.e.l.l.

In the Greek myth, Orpheus goes to h.e.l.l to seek Eurydice, his wife, who has gone there upon her death. He charms Hades and wins permission to take her out of the realm of d.a.m.nation.

I could not be Orpheus, however, because Stormy Llewellyn, my Eurydice, had not gone to h.e.l.l, but to a far better place, which she so well deserved. If this was h.e.l.l and if I had come here on a rescue mission, the soul that I struggled to save must be my own.

As I began to conclude that the trapdoor between this crawls.p.a.ce and the second level of the hotel must have been plated over with twisted and melted metal, I almost fell through a hole in the floor. Beyond that hole, my light played across the skeletal walls of what might have once been a supply room.

The trapdoor and ladder were gone, reduced to ashes. Relieved, I dropped into the s.p.a.ce below, landed on my feet, stumbled, but kept my balance.

I stepped between the twisted steel studs of a missing wall, into the main corridor. Only one floor above ground level, I should be able to escape the hotel without resorting to the guarded stairs.

The first thing my flashlight fell upon were tracks that looked like those I had seen when I first entered the Panamint. They had made me think saber-tooth saber-tooth.

The second thing the light revealed were human footprints, which led within a few steps to Datura, who switched on her flashlight the moment that mine found her.

FIFTY-ONE.

WHAT A b.i.t.c.h. AND I MEAN THAT IN EVERY SENSE OF the phrase.

'Hey, boyfriend,' Datura said.

In addition to a flashlight, she held a pistol.

She said, 'I was at the bottom of the north stairs, having some wine, staying loose, waiting to feel the power, you know, your power, drawing me, the way Danny the Geek said it could.'

'Don't talk,' I pleaded. 'Just shoot me.'

Ignoring my interruption, she continued: 'I got bored. I get bored easy. Earlier, I noticed these big cat prints in the ashes at the foot of the stairs. They're on the stairs, too. So I decided to follow them.'

The fire had raged with special ferocity in this part of the hotel. Most of the inner walls had burned away, leaving a vast and gloomy s.p.a.ce, the ceiling supported by red-steel columns encased in concrete. Over the years, ashes and dust had continued to settle, laying a smooth, lush carpet, over which my saber-toothed tiger had recently been wandering this way and that.

'The beast has been all over this place,' she said. 'I got so interested in the way it went in circles and meandered back on itself, I completely forgot about you. Completely forgot. And that's just when I heard you coming and switched off my flashlight. Mondo cool, boyfriend. I thought I was following the cat, but I was being drawn to you when I least expected. You are one strange dude, you know that?'

'I know that,' I admitted.

'Is there really a cat, or were the prints made by a phantom you conjured up to lead me here?'

'There's really a cat,' I a.s.sured her.

I was very tired. And dirty. I wanted to be done with this, go home, and take a bath.

Approximately twelve feet separated us. If we had been a few feet closer, I might have tried to rush her, duck in under her arm and take the gun away from her.

If I could keep her talking, an opportunity to turn the tables might arise. Fortunately, keeping her talking would require no more effort on my part than would breathing.

'I knew this prince from Nigeria,' Datura said, 'he claimed to be an isangoma isangoma, said he could change into a panther after midnight.'

'Why not at ten o'clock?'

'I don't think he really could. I think he was lying because he wanted to screw me.'

'You don't have to worry about that with me,' I said.

'This must be a phantom cat, some sort of eidolon. Why would a real cat be prowling around in this smelly dump?'

I said, 'Close to the western summit of Kilimanjaro, around nineteen thousand feet, there's the dried, frozen carca.s.s of a leopard.'

'The mountain in Africa?'

I quoted, 'No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that alt.i.tude.''

She frowned. 'I don't get it. What's the mystery? He's a mean d.a.m.n leopard, he can go anywhere he wants.'

'It's a line from The Snows of Kilimanjaro.''

Gesturing with the gun, she expressed her impatience.

I explained: 'That's a short story by Ernest Hemingway.'

'The guy with the line of furniture? What's Hemingway got to do with this?'

I shrugged. 'I have a friend who's always thrilled when I make a literary allusion. He thinks I could be a writer.'

'Are the two of you gay or something?' she asked.

'No. He's hugely fat, and I'm supernaturally gifted, that's all.'

'Boyfriend, sometimes you don't make a lot of sense. Did you kill Robert?'

Except for our two swords of light, shining past each other, the second floor receded into unrelieved darkness. While I had been in the crawls.p.a.ces and the vertical chase, the last light had washed out of the winter day.

I didn't mind dying, but this cavernous fire-blackened pit was an ugly place to do it.

'Did you kill Robert?' she repeated.

'He fell off a balcony.'

'Yeah, after you shot him.' She didn't sound upset. In fact she regarded me with the calculation of a black widow spider deciding whether to take a mate. 'You play clueless pretty well, but you're for sure a mundunugu mundunugu.'

'Something was wrong with Robert.'

She frowned. 'I don't know what it is. My needy boys don't always stay with me as long as I'd like.'

'They don't?'

'Except Andre. He's a real bull, Andre is.'

'I thought he was a horse. Cheval Andre.'

'A total stallion,' she said. 'Where's Danny the Geek? I want him back. He's a funny little monkey.'

'I cut his throat and pitched him down a shaft.' My claim electrified her. Her nostrils flared, and a hard pulse appeared in her slender throat.

'If he didn't die in the fall,' I told her, 'he's bled to death by now. Or drowned. The shaft's got twenty or thirty feet of water at the bottom.'

'Why would you have done that?'

'He betrayed me. He told you my secrets.'

Datura licked her lips as though she had just finished eating a tasty dessert. 'You've got as many layers as an onion, boyfriend.'

I had decided to play the we're-two-of-a-kind-why-don't-we-join-forces game, but another opportunity arose.

She said, 'The Nigerian prince was full of s.h.i.t, but I might believe you can become a panther after midnight.'

'It's not a panther,' I said.

'Yeah? So what is it you become?'

'It's not a saber-toothed tiger, either.'

'Do you become a leopard, like on Kilimanjaro?' she asked.

'It's a mountain lion.'

The California mountain lion, one of the world's most formidable predators, prefers to live in rugged mountains and forests, but it adapts well to rolling hills and low scrub.

Mountain lions thrive in the dense, almost lush scrub in the hills and canyons around Pico Mundo, and often they venture into adjoining territory that would be cla.s.sified as true desert. A male mountain lion will claim as much as a hundred square miles as his hunting range, and he likes to roam.

In the mountains, he'll feed on mule deer and bighorn sheep. In territory as barren as the Mojave, he will chase down coyotes, foxes, racc.o.o.ns, rabbits, and rodents, and he will enjoy the variety.

'Males of the species average between one hundred thirty and one hundred fifty pounds,' I told her. 'They prefer the cover of night for hunting.'

That look of wide-eyed girlish wonder-which I had first seen on our way to the casino with Doom and Gloom, and which was the only appealing and guileless expression that she possessed- overcame her again. 'Are you gonna show me?'

I said, 'Even in the daytime, if a mountain lion is on the move instead of resting, people rarely see it because it's so quiet. It pa.s.ses without detection.'

As excited as ever she had been at a human sacrifice, she said, 'These paw prints-they're yours yours, aren't they?'

'Mountain lions are solitary and secretive.'

'Solitary and secretive, but you're going to show me me.' She had demanded miracles, fabulous impossible things, icy fingers up and down her spine. Now she thought that I would at last deliver. 'You didn't conjure these tracks to lead me here. You transformed transformed and made these tracks yourself.'

If Datura's and my positions had been reversed, I would have been standing with my back to the mountain lion, oblivious as it stalked me.

As wrong as nature is-with its poisonous plants, predatory animals, earthquakes, and floods-sometimes it gets things right.